MANUFACTURING CONSENT:

a.k.a. THE ESSENCE OF DEMOCRACY - MARGINALIZING THE GENERAL PUBLIC & REDUCING THEM TO APATHY TO MAINTAIN ELITIST CONTROL

Manufactured consent is borrowed from a book written by Walter Lipmann in 1921 who described this concept as a revolution in the practice of democracy. What it amounts to is a technique of control. And he said this was useful and necessary and useful because the common interests of all the people elude them and so they (the elitists) have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class – notice that that is the opposite of the standard view of democracy. A version of this is expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his book called “moral man and immoral society” who incidentally was very influential on contemporary policymakers. He said rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man he follows not reason, but faith and this naïve faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over simplifications which are provided by the “mythmaker” to keep the “ordinary” person on course. It is not the case as the naïve might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather as this whole line of thinkers observe, it is the essence of democracy.

The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state it doesn’t much matter what people think because you’ve got a bludgeon over their head and so you can control what they do, but when the state loses the bludgeon, when u can’t control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem “it might make people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule” and therefore you have to control what people think and so the standard way to do this, is what in more honest days was called propaganda, manufacture of consent, the creation of necessary illusion – various ways of either marginalizing the general public reducing them to apathy of some fashion.

This view is widely held and deeply rooted in our own civilization….

It goes back to the Origin of modern democracy which goes back to the 17^th c. English revolution where there was a struggle b/n parliament representing the gentry and the merchants and the Royalists representing other elite groups and they were fighting it out. At the same time there were many popular movements that were questioning everything; the relation b/n master and servant, the right of authority all together, there was a lot of radical publishing and this disturbed the elites on both sides of the civil war. So as one historian pointed out at the time in 1660 –he criticized the radical democrats, the ones that were calling for what we would call democracy, because “they have made the people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.”

Now underlining these doctrines which were very widely held, there is a certain conception of democracy, it is a GAME for elites, and it’s not for the ignorant masses that have to be marginalized, diverted and controlled, of course for their own good. The same principles were upheld in the American colonies, the dictum of the founding fathers of democracy that “the people who ‘owned’ the country ought to govern it” – quoting John Jay.

In modern times, for elites this “contrary view about the intellectual life of the media and so on is in fact now the standard one.

~~~Excerpt transcribed from Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”

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